Much of the tech press in recent years has confused fact and fiction, spending billions of bytes discussing rumors with little or no foundation with all the seriousness of a call to war or a presidential campaign. (They do it because people love these stories, of course, and read them eagerly.)

When the Nexus One was announced, I was disappointed, since there were just a few improvements over existing Android devices. The fact that Google was selling the device directly over its Web site seemed to be much ado about nothing, given that buyers had to sign a T-Mobile contract to use it. Plus, it's not as if Web sales is a new idea.

The hope was that Google might assert strong leadership in the mobile space. And it took the rumor-happy tech press a week or so to realize their emperor had no clothes.

Two weeks after the frenzy has subsided and the finger-pointing has begun, we can take several lessons from Google's Nexus One escapade:

Lesson 1: Google's role is unclear, as are its goalsGoogle needs to figure out whether Android is to be a community technology or one it drives. Right now, Google is trying to have it both ways, though it's showing signs of giving up on the community that it first touted as the path to innovation, à la the open source model so beloved by pundits. Though in this case, the "community" turned out to be the same old device manufacturers and carriers that three years on still can't compete with the iPhone.

The surprise, though, was HTC's Droid Eris, which augmented Android's clumsy UI with a nice Sense overlay that in some respects outclasses the iPhone. The device itself is pokey and a bit cheap, but it showed the promise of Android under more sophisticated hands than Google or Motorola.

So it was no surprise that Google worked with HTC to create the Nexus One -- except that the Nexus One didn't get the Sense UI, instead being essentially a minor rev to earlier me-too models. No multitouch UI (how is that even possible?), no groundbreaking new capabilities, no carrier independence (not even in the unlocked model), and no business-class security -- nothing, in other words, that would set it apart from, or even equal to, the iPhone.